Aftab Omer

Thomas Steininger talks with Aftab Omer

Aftab Omer, president of Meridian University in California, has focused his work for decades on the emergence of human capacities and transformative learning communities. It’s not surprising that he’s noticed a new dialogical opening in the internet sphere.  

With the social distancing due to COVID 19, a new quality of online conversation has been born. And it won’t leave us. Millions of people have now joined the conversation in online conference spaces like Zoom and others.  

These are not chat rooms–they are real, live, face-to-face meetings that are local and global, for personal reasons or business purposes. This new live and alive character of global conversations changes the way we can come together.

Someone started to call these meetings “digital campfires.” Just as our ancestors 100,000 years ago came together around campfires and started to develop language, tell stories, and develop culture, our new digital campfires come alive around the globe, giving us an unprecedented way to connect across cultures and distances.  We can share personal stories, share information, and start to reform our global culture. Nobody owns these conversations. Nobody owns their creative insights. Aftab Omer calls them the new digital commons.  

This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Aftab Omer about the nerw emergence of the dialogical commons in our global cyberspace.

Aftab Omer

A dialogue with Aftab Omer

Aftab Omer, president of Meridian University in California, has focused his work for decades on the emergence of human capacities and transformative learning communities. It’s not surprising that he’s noticed a new dialogical opening in the internet sphere.  

With the social distancing due to COVID 19, a new quality of online conversation has been born. And it won’t leave us. Millions of people have now joined the conversation in online conference spaces like Zoom and others.  

These are not chat rooms–they are real, live, face-to-face meetings that are local and global, for personal reasons or business purposes. This new live and alive character of global conversations changes the way we can come together.

Someone started to call these meetings “digital campfires.” Just as our ancestors 100,000 years ago came together around campfires and started to develop language, tell stories, and develop culture, our new digital campfires come alive around the globe, giving us an unprecedented way to connect across cultures and distances.  We can share personal stories, share information, and start to reform our global culture. Nobody owns these conversations. Nobody owns their creative insights. Aftab Omer calls them the new digital commons.  

This week in Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Aftab Omer about the nerw emergence of the dialogical commons in our global cyberspace.

Joe Brewer

Ein Gespräch mit Joe Brewer

The crises that humanity faces are reaching a culmination point: pandemic, financial, wealth gap, food production, and climate. The fundamental life-systems that have supported us are being challenged and are under collapse. According to complexity researcher Joe Brewer, we have reached a point where the veil is finally lifting to reveal the root cause of this metacrisis. Using the very new but simultaneously very old form of agriculture that we now call “Permaculture,” Brewer helps us to understand the different mindset that will allow us to respond to this global emergency. Permaculture, according to Wikipedia, is a “set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems.” What does this mean for our human systems?

In this powerful conversation, Joe Brewer explains how we need to undergo a process of “re-indigenousation” of modern humanity. In his own global project called “Earth Regenerators,” he teaches both the conceptual frameworks and practical tools for regenerating Earth–both the planet and the soil. 

In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Joe Brewer about how “re-indigenousation” is an answer to the metacrisis.

Ein Gespräch mit Michel Bauwens

We are living in a time of fundamental transition. Just as the printing press led to a collapse of medieval society in Europe, which marked the dramatic beginning of Early Modernity, our global interconnectivity is changing our society into something that we have not seen before.  

It started with the enthusiasm of the early internet age, where people collaborated, creating software and projects together, revealing the thrilling potential of equal opportunity, creativity, and innovation.  

Then the internet giants, like Google and Facebook, created new forms of dependence and control. More recently, companies like Uber and Airbnb connect consumers and, at the same time, destroy local businesses. And of course, the viral information revolution started a new epidemic of fake news.  

Even though we think we have seen it all already, according to Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, we have just begun. By his observation, we are in the midst of a system change where a new collaborative culture, with a new recognition of collective contribution to a shared common good, is emergent now.  

This new culture of the “commons” can come out of this chaotic and dramatic time of transition. Michel Bauwans offers a deeper understanding of the transition that we are experiencing right now, allowing us to see that our crises can be a big transition into a new culture of collaboration.  

In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Michel Bauwens about the Peer-to-Peer Revolution and the chance to develop a new cooperative society.

Ein Gespräch mit Jordan Hall

Obviously, we are in a time of crisis – with the Corona Virus, the economy, the finance industry, climate change, and more. But could these all have a culmination point? Is there a meta-crisis at the center of all of these? Jordan Hall suggests that there is. He calls it a crisis of sense making. Our modern post-war society was based on systems of institutions, bodies of democratic governance, academic scientific institutions, finance and media institutions. These systems developed and held highly specialized knowledge and power hierarchies that managed the progress of the industrial world. Jordan Hall calls them the “Blue Church” and their aproach to reality as “managerial consciousness.”

But at least the since the 1990s, the world started to change dramatically.Jordan Hall notes that we live in an explosion of speed and complexity. In the networked global reality of the internet, he tells us, the modern means of managing society where each area is in an isolated “silo” of knowledge and power does not seem to work anymore.What do we do?Jordan Hall takes us to the edge of his own research and observation. There is a new networked form of collective sense making, he says, still in its infancy and, right now, riddled with dangerous childhood diseases. But as the old paradigm of a manageable world fails, this very new awareness- and data-based collective sense making seems to hold answers that can help create a livable future on Earth.

In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Jordan Hall about the crisis of sense making…and the emerging response of collective sense making.

A Conversation with Peter Merry

With the crisis of the coronaviurs and the shuddering economy, the systems that we have depended on are collapsing, and at the same time, something new is moving between human beings–even in social isolation. So many people are responding to this humanitarian crisis with heart and generosity: volunteers helping the elderly get groceries, healthcare workers risking their lives, and people connecting people online in new ways. To Peter Merry, Chief Innovation Officer at Ubiquity University, and co-founder of the Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence, this seems to be a new movement with a new potential, Humanity Rising.

The spontaneous rising and coming together of human beings globally has some kind of magic. There are no big organisations organizing people. Many things  are happening in a very spontaneous way. Our shared global and local situation is creating this new wave of engagement. This emerging movement has been called an awareness-based new global power.

Inspired by this unique moment of opening and potential for change, Peter Merry has been working to bring radical thinkers and experts together from around the globe to explore the emergent direction of this new movement. Humanity Rising is the result: an online forum of deep engagement that will help set a direction post-crisis.

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Peter Merry about how the emerging global crisis could allow a new humanity to rise.

Ein Special Dialog – Event with Terry Patten

There is so much that needs to be done in response to this global crisis–from everyday practicalities to potential system changes to confronting our own death or that of a loved one. But what is the foundation from which we are responding? How do we stay open to all that is happening and not shut down?

We need strong spiritual foundation to remain responsive and to hold perspective. For Terry Patten, this is a time to practice gratitude. Terry is an internationally known integral thinker, social activist, and author of A New Republic of the Heart. He sees the twin processes of gratitude and grieving as an essential part of what can keep us grounded and present at this critical time. As he says, “We can evolve our practice of grieving; it doesn’t have to collapse our hearts; it can expand them.”

Perhaps the one certainty of this period of time is unpredicatable and unprecedented change. Two months ago it would have been unimaginable to think that most of the world would be in some form of quarantine or isolation. Practicing to be with radical uncertainty, to be grateful to life as it is, gives us an anchor through this turbulence. Terry provides us with an example and different ways we can connect to our hearts and the preciousness of human relationship in order to meet the further challenges of this time.  

In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger speaks with Terry Patten about a heartfelt response to the coronacrisis.

Thomas Steininger spricht mit dem buddhistischen Lehrer, Soryu Forall

The coronavirus is an enormous challenge for the world and for each of us. How can we stay present, open, and vulnerable during this historic stress test of our own health, psychological stability, and society? At the same time, panic can become a pandemic that can shred the cohesion and compassion in our communities. How do we not panic and not bury our heads in the sand? To be human also simply means to be really present, to be present and to stay in relationship with each other. This calls us to spiritual maturity, which is something that Soryu Forall sees as essential as we collectively face an increasingly uncertain future.

Soryu Forall, an American Buddhist teacher and founder of the Monastic Academy

in Vermont, sees spiritual training as critical for developing the

equanimity to deal with the chaos of climate change and global

disruption. His “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth”

(MAPLE) aims to develop leaders who can create deeply sustainable

communities of resilience and compassion for All of Life. Soryu Forall

has trained mindfulness teachers all over the world and is known for his

fight against systemic injustice and the empowerment of youth.

Ein Gespräch mit Prof. Leo Burke

It is stating the obvious to say that climate

collapse is one of the biggest crises of our time, and may, in fact, be

one of the biggest in the history of our beautiful planet.  

The two sides of the crisis seem very clear. On

one hand, there is our living planet that over billions of years has

created a thriving and evolving ecosystem that in itself is a big living

organism, beautiful, fragile, and alive. On the other hand, there is

our modernist capitalist culture, which is based on a materialist,

monetarised perspective on reality. From this perspective, nothing is

really real that cannot be measured and then valued in money. This

materialist perception on reality has become the biggest threat to life

on earth. And Big Business, particularly Big Oil, leads the campaign to

insist that this is the only reality–thereby threatening the diversity

of life on Earth.

Enter Leo Burke.

While he would agree that there is truth to this perspective, Dr. Burke

has a different story to tell. In his professional role, Dr. Burke is

Professor of Management and Director of the Global Commons Initiative at

University of Notre Dame. As part of a  “Climate Investing” initiative,

last year he participated in two meetings with CEOs and other leading

managers of some the world’s biggest oil companies at the Vatican, where

the Pope was also present. The question at these meetings was simple,

“What can we, the oil companies, do to stop climate change?” Was this

just a high level “green washing” show? Or does the climate crisis have

the potential to bring us humans–all of us–together in a new way?

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas

Steininger speaks with Prof. Leo Burke talks about his heartening

experiences with a new post-oppositional form of climate activism.

Ein Gespräch mit Amy Edelstein

Amy Edelstein, and the team of educators whom she has trained, have taught mindful awareness and meditation to over 10,000 high school students in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, which means “city of brotherly love,” is now riddled with gun violence, poverty, and racial conflict. Over 80% of Amy’s students come from the poorest neighborhoods in the city, which has a notoriously troubled school system. Does it make a difference?

Remarkably so–even with the coolest, toughest

teens. The youth fall in love with their own inner life–and their

capacity to develop. This one educational program that focuses on inner

strength, compassion, kindness, and the aspiration to grow and develop

ourselves, our higher potentials, makes a difference in the lives of

these young people. What could the impact be on their communities and

our troubled societies?  

In this Radio evolve interview with Thomas

Steininger, Amy Edelstein shares her vision, experiences, and

reflections on a new inner education to awaken the spirit of youth.